


Crawled Back To The Life That I Said I Wouldn't Live In

by sentipensante



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Teenagers, Hand Jobs, Immortal Husbands Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Joe is 19, Kissing, M/M, Marijuana, Modern AU, Nicky is 17, Nicky | Nicolò di Genova Needs a Hug, Orgasm Delay/Denial, POV Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Public Hand Jobs, Recreational Drug Use, Skatepunk AU, Underage Drinking, in a state where the age of consent is 17 and the age thing is not a Thing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-10
Updated: 2020-12-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:00:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26926249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sentipensante/pseuds/sentipensante
Summary: “This ismycouch, I’m the one who dragged it under the bridge.”Nicky looks up, heavy-lidded, while the unexpected voice bounces repeatedly off pillared concrete and the iron beams that criss-cross overhead. There’s a guy – dark curls and darker eyes, with a pink slash of lips because they’re pressed thin with anger as he stalks forward on big-booted feet –  that Nicky is pretty sure he recognizes from... around. Parties? The park, definitely; he’s got a battered skateboard tucked under his arm like it’s a sheathed weapon. Hell, it might just end up saving the guy’s life sometime, at this time of day and in this part of town.But this particular bridge is tucked away, a hidden gem where hardly anyone ever goes, since they’re currently atop a steep incline that leads down to the train tracks. Gets too loud for most, when the trains slow down to pass through the residential area on the far side of the bridge. The scream of the brakes clatters against all this steel and stone, so loud that it splinters into Nicky’s skull, reverberating between his ears until everything else goes silent.Nicky doesn’t mind the noise.-or-The skatepunk teenager AU that you never knew you wanted.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 53
Kudos: 134





	1. Paisley & Honey

**Author's Note:**

> This started out as a tumblr prompt from _immacaria_ for my Immortal Husbands skatepunk AU, and it very quickly grew legs and ran away from me. I knew about halfway through that this was going to end up being a multi-chapter fic. Because that's just who I am as a person, I guess. Ahem.
> 
> Title is from the song [Hallucinogenics](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wy9sXy5oHjw&ab_channel=MattMaeson) by Matt Maeson, and I highly suggest you take a listen.
> 
> Beta'd by my beloved [eagle_2](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eagle_2/pseuds/eagle_2).
> 
> Please follow me on tumblr at [moretome-thanyoucandream](https://moretome-thanyoucandream.tumblr.com/)!

“This is _my_ couch, I’m the one who dragged it under the bridge.”

Nicky looks up, heavy-lidded, while the unexpected voice bounces repeatedly off pillared concrete and the iron beams that criss-cross overhead. There’s a guy – dark curls and darker eyes, with a pink slash of lips because they’re pressed thin with anger as he stalks forward on big-booted feet – that Nicky is pretty sure he recognizes from... around. Parties? The park, definitely; he’s got a battered skateboard tucked under his arm like it’s a sheathed weapon. Hell, it might just end up saving the guy’s life sometime, at this time of day and in this part of town. 

But this particular bridge is tucked away, a hidden gem where hardly anyone ever goes, since they’re currently atop a steep incline that leads down to the train tracks. Gets too loud for most, when the trains slow down to pass through the residential area on the far side of the bridge. The scream of the brakes clatters against all this steel and stone, so loud that it splinters into Nicky’s skull, reverberating between his ears until everything else goes silent.

Nicky doesn’t mind the noise. It can even be a balm, sometimes, against the scream of everything else that packs tight behind his eyes until the roar wants to claw its way out of a throat that has felt scraped raw for years.

Nicky, with his mouth already slanted sideways like he’s trying not to laugh, tips his head up as the guy stomps closer, keeping eye contact from his lower position, sprawled out on the love seat with his knees relaxed and wide. His eyelids feel like they’re lined with cotton batting. And then his head keeps tipping until it’s leaned entirely against the back of the couch and Nicky is grinning now, rubbing one hand over the arm where the upholstery is frayed in places and scorched with holes in others. He recognizes the little circles as cigarette burns.

“My friend, I am afraid you have terrible taste.”

It’s mild. Sarcasm eased with slitted, bloodshot eyes and the exposed column of his throat. A more pessimistic guy might be worried about that board actually being used against him as a weapon, cracked over his shoulder or against his ribs. A casualty of territorial claim, the teenage version of Finders Keepers. 

But Nicky can be an optimist, sometimes. Even _if_ the guy with eyes like obsidian wants to hurt him because of some supposed claim over a mildewed couch under a bridge, Nicky knows how to fight. 

And there is the press of cold switchblade metal that he can feel tucked in his waistband. That helps. 

The dark-haired guy opens his mouth, then promptly shuts it again.Tilts his head a little and squints at Nicky, whose grin just widens. He feels like the guy is trying to figure him out, and silently wishes him luck. Most times, Nicky feels like he doesn’t even know himself.

With the hand that isn’t picking at melted threads of synthetic fabric, he lifts up the joint that’s still lit and dangling between his fingers. The cherry glows as he hauls in a lungful of smoke tasting like pine and berries bursting on his tongue, the ember a pale mimicry of the setting sun that bleeds gold and scarlet from behind the trees on the other side of the train tracks. He closes his eyes and holds the smoke in his lungs, burning acrid, holds and holds until it’s too much and he has to hack out a cough with his eyes watering even as he feels the sensation of a balloon in his head inflating just a little more, lifting him just a little bit further off the ground. Away from all the shit, from sleeping on cold concrete with the chill biting through his jeans, away from the detritus that litters the way back to the house that hasn't felt much like home since his older brother moved out - away from tinny Christian music spilling out of the radio and the faintly musty smell of bible pages, and cigarette burns hidden under his sleeves.

And then something breaks through the haze of smoke that’s curling cobalt around Nicky’s head; he opens his eyes and the guy is _laughing_. Nicky has a split second to marvel at how it transforms the guy’s face, with the corners of his eyes crinkling up and laugh lines dimpling each of his stubbled cheeks on either side of his mouth like parentheses around a blessed secret. Just a second, to think _fuck, he’s beautiful_ and then one of the guy’s booted feet kicks gently at Nicky’s heel, and he’s jerking his chin in a motion that clearly means Nicky should scoot over.

Nicky doesn’t move his ass over any on the cushion, because it’s a fucking love seat, and there’s nowhere else for him to go - but he does pull his legs over so there’s more room on the other half and watches, eyes widening a little, as the guy sets his board on the ground at their feet and swings his backpack off his shoulders so that he can flop onto the cushion next to Nicky. There’s barely enough room for the two of them and their legs are pressed together, hip to knee, and Nicky wonders at the heat that seems to bleed through two layers of jeans and into his own skin from the other guy.

“You’re right,” the guy says, and Nicky stares at him a little blearily, confused. Or just stoned, maybe. He feels like his vision is darkening around the edges until it’s narrowed down to just the warm press of the other guy’s leg against him. The guy laughs again at his expression and Nicky thinks he wants to crawl inside that sound and curl up there, maybe take a nap like a cat in a sunbeam. 

“Yeah, it’s a really ugly fucking couch,” the guy clarifies, shaking his head a little and unzipping his backpack where it rests on his knees. He pulls out a bottle of something that shines like honey in the fading light under the bridge and unscrews the cap, lifts it to his lips and Nicky feels a wild pang in his belly, giddy and sort of inwardly hysterical because he’s jealous of a fucking whiskey bottle, and is this really even happening? The guy lowers the bottle and there’s a drop that clings to the center of his bottom lip and Nicky desperately wants to lean in and lick it off. Wants to taste the peat and the malt and the sunshine that seems to spill out of this guy’s pores like salted sweat. “I found it on the side of the road, somebody’s grandma must have been throwing it out or something. I mean, who else would have a paisley couch, right? So I called one of my boys and he helped me carry it down here.”

Nicky realizes that he’s been staring at the guy’s mouth for too long when a chunk of ash falls off the end of the joint and onto his jeans, but he doesn’t move to brush it off right away. It’s not like they’re not filthy already. But it serves to break him out of his reverie that’s only thinly veiled by his bloodshot eyes, and he suddenly holds out the joint between them. A meager offering, maybe, for a guy who looks like - _that_ \- but it’s what he’s got to work with, okay?

“Nicky,” he blurts out, softly, voice a little thick from coughing. In his determination to _stop staring at his goddamn mouth, Nicolò_ , he’s fixed his gaze on the seam where their legs are pressed together, so he startles a little when the bottle is thrust into view. He reaches out to wrap his fingers around the neck and take it, lift it to his mouth to swallow down fire, try to extinguish the flame that’s been lit in his belly, but he’s stopped when the guy doesn’t release his hold on the bottle. 

Nicky’s gaze snaps upward until he’s locked back in the beam of pitch-dark, so dark that he can’t tell in the stretching shadows where the guy’s pupil ends and his iris begins. But the second their eyes meet, his grip loosens on the bottle so that it sloshes as Nicky’s pull suddenly jerks it closer, faster than he expects, and it knocks hard against his sternum. And the guy has plucked the spliff from between his index and middle fingers so delicately that Nicky barely felt it, just sees the billow of smoke around them as the guy exhales and Nicky tips the bottle back, trying not to wince as he chokes down two gulps, three, the supposed taste of Tennessee searing his throat on the way down. Not like he’d know - he’s never even left the state.

But he’s about ready to leave his body for good with the slither of ease and hazy confidence that starts to work its way down from the top of his spine. His cheeks feel warm and he knows they’re probably flushed ruddy in the cooling air as night sinks down around them, spreading like a puddle of velvet so that the rest of the world that doesn’t exist beyond the underside of this bridge goes silent. He stops for air, licks over his lips and moves to hand the bottle back, and then his heart is lodged somewhere behind his molars and it’s skipping fucking double dutch because he’s caught the guy, the one who smells like tobacco and leather and some unnameable spice, staring at _Nicky’s_ mouth.

“Joe.”

“Huh?” And it’s Nicky’s turn to squint now, leaning back a little as he turns his upper body so he can get a better look at the guy’s face without taking away any of the contact that burns hip to kneecap like a wildfire. And then he’s watching a wide, generous mouth tick upward into a lazy sort of smirk and he gets it now, duh. “Right. Hello. ...Joe.”

He tries it out like it’s a flavour he’s never tasted. Savouring the weight of a single syllable on his tongue like the vanilla and honey from the whiskey that scorched his insides, turning it over between his teeth as if he can suck the marrow out and parse something about the guy - _Joe_ , he reminds himself - just from the way his name feels in his mouth.

Joe’s still smiling, though now it’s a little softer around the edges and he sinks lower into his cushion on the love seat, and Nicky knows he’s at that stage where it’s, like - _I am one with this couch, this couch is all that exists_. Nicky’s been there for most of the evening, ever since he headed out to try and avoid dinnertime with his parents and found a couch that had suddenly appeared under his favourite bridge. Where he comes to watch the trains and let the noise needle its way under his scalp and his fingernails and his eyelashes, pushing away all the rest and smoothing over the itch that crawls under his skin every second of every day that he isn’t here. 

Right now, feeling like he might need skin grafts on the outside of his thigh from the heat that’s burning him up from the inside? Right now he thinks he maybe found something even better than the trains. 

“Hey yourself, Nicky.” Joe is still smirking at him as he tries to hand back the joint and Nicky waves him off, leaning his head back to rest against the couch and closing his eyes. Silently he asks the world to stop spinning, or at the very least to stop this near-stranger from becoming the sun that’s dragged Nicky into his orbit with a hook somewhere behind his rib cage.

“No, I am good for now. All you.” Nicky’s tongue is lead in his mouth and he imagines that his teeth will end up chipped and he knows it will be worth it, for just a few moments spent with Joe leaned up against his side. From somewhere behind the fireworks that are sparking off against the inside of Nicky’s eyelids, he hears Joe’s voice winding around him like silk ties.

“You wanna lay down for a bit? S’cool if you do. I don’t mind.” Nicky cracks one eye open and he sees that Joe’s smile has tempered into something mild. Maybe even a little cautious? Something that says it’s not a trap, as he shifts - turning on the cushion so that the welded line of their thighs is broken and Nicky sort of wants to weep for the loss, but then Joe hikes his knee up until one of his boots is tucked between the cushion and the back of the couch behind Nicky’s hip. His other foot is still on the concrete so that his legs are open in an inviting ‘v’ shape, and normally it would make Nicky hard, a guy like Joe looking like _that_ : legs spread, expectant, waiting for Nicky to crawl between his thighs.

And, alright, maybe Nicky’s dick gives a vaguely interested twitch in his jeans, but it’s through such a fog swirling between his temples and behind his eyes that he really fucking wants to be more horizontal in a thoroughly non-sexy way. Even just for a few minutes, until his stomach settles. Maybe he should’ve swiped something to eat for dinner before he chugged Jack on an empty stomach. He glances up at the look on Joe’s face one more time, hoping to God that the guy isn’t just waiting for him to take the bait before turning shit ugly. He doesn’t want to see that sneer on Joe’s face as he calls Nicky - well. Calls him the same shit that Nicky hears from other mouths every day.

But Joe just smiles at him, and it’s so open, near beatific as he makes a gesture with both arms, elbows resting on his knees, like _c’mon already_ , and Nicky thinks _fuck it_. Every molecule in his body is telling him that Joe will not hurt him. He turns, with no small amount of effort, and scoots back on the love seat until his back is slowly lowering down to rest on the guy’s broad chest. He is acutely aware that his ass is more or less in Joe’s lap and he’s suddenly so grateful that his hoodie is long enough to cover his own crotch, even as the change in angle and the back of his skull coming to rest against Joe’s collarbone seems to level everything out to a manageable level of white noise. 

The world doesn’t spin anymore. He’s got the smell of leather and faint sweat in his nose and it’s an anchor that pulls him back down to the earth; the balloon in his skull deflates so that it’s not packed so tight against his temples and he feels like he can breathe again without a band strapped around his chest. After a few seconds and a few rise-falls of Joe’s chest underneath him, Nicky actually lets the tension leech out of his muscles, and his head turns so that he’s facing the tracks, and the buttons on Joe’s dark green Henley press against his temple.

Nicky doesn’t mind.

Joe’s hands don’t come anywhere near him, and he doesn’t know if he should feel relieved or offended. He knows the guy has the joint in one hand even as it’s dwindling down to the cardboard filter; he hears the softest crackle of burning paper when Joe takes an inhale, and then a sloshing noise as he presumably lifts the bottle to take another swig. A clink - maybe Joe setting the bottle down on the concrete between his abandoned skateboard and the couch? Nicky’s eyes flutter open for a moment and he just barely catches a red-hot arc through the darkness that could only be Joe flicking the roach down the concrete incline, knowing it will burn out somewhere amid the gravel at the bottom with no risk of starting a fire.

“Thank you,” Nicky mumbles, and if his tongue was leaden before, now it’s tungsten and feels almost welded to the roof of his mouth. He feels Joe sigh underneath him again. But it feels - sounds - almost... content? Nicky wants to tamp down the flicker of hope that zigzags through his arteries and towards his heart. Wants to tell himself they’re both just fucked up, and Joe is the sort of person to let a stranger lay down in his lap when that stranger has the spins and there isn’t a ton of room. 

Nicky’s legs are basically accordion-folded against the arm of the love seat until he shifts a little, grunting softly with the effort, and finally wriggles into just the right position so that his knees are slung over the arm of the couch, feet dangling in the air, and he feels the strain in his thighs start to unwind. 

Joe is quiet for a long moment, and Nicky worries that maybe he’s realized their position could be considered compromising and rethought it. Or maybe he’s just started to feel the effects of high-THC indica mixed with honeyed whiskey. Maybe he didn’t stop to eat dinner at home, either. And then there’s a broad hand suddenly resting against the crown of Nicky’s head and thick, gentle fingers threading through his hair until Joe’s nails can scratch lightly over his scalp, and Nicky understands that Joe is not rethinking anything. There’s always the chance that come morning he will act like Nicky did something wrong - but for whatever gut instinct reason, Nicky doesn’t think that Joe is like that. 

And as Joe’s other hand slides around Nicky’s chest and comes to rest palm-down against his breastbone, fingers splayed and slightly rucking the material of his shirt - well, Nicky does not think that Joe is like anyone he has ever met.


	2. Shearling & Smoke

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note the upgrade to explicit in this chapter, pls! Endless love for [eagle_2](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eagle_2/pseuds/eagle_2) for her beta-ing. <3
> 
> As always, you can yell at me on [tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/moretome-thanyoucandream).

Slowly, inch by inch, Nicky clambers up from a sleep so thick that his eyelashes feel woven shut. 

His world is only sensation in those first few moments. The air is cool on his cheeks and the tip of his nose, but he’s warm everywhere else with his fingers tucked under the cuffs of both his hoodie and his jacket. And then there’s the furnace blazing against his ribs. 

One of his feet has gone to sleep inside his checkered Vans, where his legs are slung over the arm of the love seat. It’s a prickling-pain numbness, pins and needles under his skin and halfway up his calf muscle, and even still mostly unconscious, Nicky dreads trying to put weight on it when he has to move. His mouth feels like old sandpaper, and his elbow still aches where he fell on it hard while trying to land a backside noseblunt at the park yesterday. The pain is bone-deep and creeps down towards his wrist, makes his fingers on that hand feel clumsy and stiff, but he finds that the agony is subtly softened by a layer of dreamy anesthetic that seems to have pressed over Nicky like a blanket while he slept. It’s a warmth, one that tangles his limbs in a vague sense of bliss, and that heady narcosis of a really fucking deep sleep. The heat at his back has made his muscles loose and pliant; one of his arms dangles off the side of the couch and - 

_The couch._

His mind snags on the thought even through his haze of mostly-sleep, and though it isn’t enough to draw Nicky up the rest of the way to consciousness, it’s like clothing caught on a nail that’s too stubborn to be hammered down. He drifts in neither direction from sleep, just buffeted softly against the awareness that he _really does not want to wake up_. He’ll take another hour or five with the smell of leather and anise curling up from warm skin and tickling his nose, thank you. With the urge to burrow deeper into that heat making his fingers twitch where they’re curled against his palms, from down deep, his lungs gust out a soft sigh as he turns closer into the softness of cotton against his cheekbone.

And he might have lingered there longer, skirting that gauzy line between the shade of sleep that wants to pull him back under and the grey light pressing up against his eyelids. Except that the patchwork of slab concrete making up the underpass starts to tremble, in that way that Nicky always registers in his pelvis before he even hears anything. The train is probably still a few miles down the length of the track but it will have already started to kill the speed, and Nicky can feel the rumbling judder of hundreds of tons of metal and cargo that travels through the earth, up into the concrete and the iron beams of the bridge like a rib cage stretching over his head. It tickles his stomach and the roof of his mouth from the inside. 

When he finally opens his eyes, he’s in the clouds. 

Thick swathes of grey spun-sugar roll past the love seat and down the incline towards the track, like a moontide being pulled back into the ocean by greedy hands. The world is all white foam and rip current. It takes Nicky a second to realize he’s staring out at fog rolling down the embankment; he feels like he has to tread water up from the depths and break his nose and mouth out from the eddied swell before it takes hold and makes sense. At some point, Nicky snags the realization from the ether that they must have both passed the fuck out, because it’s definitely after dawn, and the cool air of the night has lowered to swaddle the both of them in a cotton-padded cushion where the fog swirls and mutes the morning’s light. He’s still clinging to the fragments of a dream that he thinks might have been about a wide, pink mouth surrounded by dark stubble, and calloused fingers digging into the meat of Nicky’s thighs - so it takes him a minute.

And at the same time, as Nicky shifts closer to awake, he realizes that there seems to be a particularly determined press of morning wood slotted against his hip where he’s turned onto his side at some point in the night, sprawled out with his cheek pressed against Joe’s chest.

A familiar smell curls against Nicky’s nose and he tilts his head up, gaze catching on the glowing ember of a cigarette held loosely between Joe’s thumb and index finger. It smells like something he knows well, almost comforting, even though Nicky doesn’t smoke. But his brother used to, crawling out their bedroom window to hunch on the garage roof and tucking his stubbed-out butts into an emptied Altoids tin until he could toss them on the way to school. They smelled the same, those cigarettes with the charcoal filter, and Nicky wonders if he’d see the same logo under Joe’s fingers if he turned his hand just right, and suddenly he misses Giovanni so much that his stomach feels scraped raw. 

Joe’s gaze slides down to meet Nicky’s as he exhales a plume that gets absorbed into the fog surrounding them, and it slowly rolls past the couch. His eyes are even closer to pitch in the dampened dawn light, somehow, and Nicky feels frozen in place by the weight of that gaze. The corner of the guy’s mouth flicks up into a lazy smile. 

“Sorry,” he says, voice ground down to soft gravel, and Nicky swallows so hard that he can hear his throat click. A part of his hind brain feels like he might choke on the press of his heartbeat against his windpipe. And he feels Joe’s quiet huff of laughter. The guy’s chest jumps under his cheek. Joe’s back arches as he shifts his position, just a little, so that his groin bumps against the place where Nicky’s jeans have slid down his hips and there’s a stripe of exposed skin. Nicky wonders if it’s on purpose, or if the guy is just trying to get comfortable. 

Like, it can’t exactly have been the most restful sleep, right? Nicky’s broad through his chest and shoulders, and he sleeps like dead weight. He knows that. And even though he feels like he could sink back down into the buffer of unconsciousness with the heat of Joe’s body and maybe not reemerge for a day or two, he’s all of a sudden wide awake, and keenly aware of the heat pressing against him at Joe’s groin.

So he shifts, turns just slightly in the guy’s lap so that they’re once again in the same position as when Nicky drifted off, his back pressed against Joe’s chest. As he lifts his cheek, he is dizzyingly grateful that he didn’t drool on the guy while they both slept. 

And Nicky tells himself sternly that he isn’t going to move his hips in a way that makes his ass grind down against the iron bar that is Joe’s cock pressing insistently into the denim of Nicky’s waistband. He _isn’t_. Instead he swallows again, looks around. The bottle of Honey Jack is on the ground, wedged between the love seat and Joe’s board. He stretches out a little and he feels a receptive twitch of his own cock where it’s trapped half-hard against the crease of his thigh.

“Are you apologizing for falling asleep, the cigarette smoke, or for the boner that’s pressing into my tailbone?” Nicky’s mouth slants slightly upwards, and he tilts his head a little so that he can rest the back of his skull in the crook of Joe’s armpit and look up at him, upside-down now. Pretending his cheeks don’t flush with warmth, or telling himself he can at least act like it’s the morning chill on his skin.

“We both fell asleep,” Joe says simply, sounding unbothered, and then a note of humour warms his voice like a drop of molten gold unspooling on the back of Nicky’s tongue. “Do you want me to apologize for the other two? You seemed like you were sleeping well. Figured I’d let you keep going for a bit, but needed a smoke. And the other thing...” Joe clears his throat, and Nicky feels the reverberation against his spine. His dick twitches again in his jeans. “I’ll apologize if it bothers you.”

But Joe’s gaze betrays him as it slides down from the place where his hand is still splayed against Nicky’s chest, just like it was last night. Nicky turns to follow the guy’s glance and his stomach bottoms out as he realizes that Joe’s fingers have twisted in the front of his oversized hoodie, enough to pull the material up so that it’s no longer covering the evidence of his own arousal where it strains against his zipper. Some frantic animal that lives in Nicky’s chest imagines that maybe he can feel the music of Joe’s pulse in his wrist, against the place where Nicky’s heart stutter-steps, just a bit. 

Because of course it doesn’t bother him. He slept better than he has in weeks, and even though he knows that it’s just biology, physiology, whatever the fuck - there’s a pulse beating inside Nicky’s chest that still wants to believe it has something to do with the fact that Nicky’s spent the night sprawled across Joe's lap. He shifts again, trying to sit up a little more, and he exhales sharply when the hard line of Joe’s cock slips against the seam of his jeans where it runs down the center of Nicky’s ass.

There’s a beat of silence.

“I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess that you’ve had morning wood before, right?” Joe murmurs softly, voice lined with the timbre of dry kindling ready to ignite, and close enough that his breath ruffles the hair behind Nicky’s ear. Nicky stills and he thinks his heartbeat must be visible, if only Joe moved his hand from Nicky’s chest - and he hopes, fiercely, that Joe does no such thing. His mind is racing too quickly for this early in the morning, putting it together, while - “So, in your experience, is having someone wriggling against it going to make the problem better, or worse?”

Nicky pauses for a couple of heartbeats. Waits until Joe leans over far enough to stub out his cigarette against the concrete of the underpass and flicks it down the incline, the same way that he disposed of the roach last night. And using Joe’s movement as an excuse, he slides over to settle more squarely in Joe’s lap, so that he can lean his head back higher against Joe’s shoulder until the guy’s stubbled chin grazes against his hairline - and in a way that makes sure to give just a little more friction against Joe’s cock. Nicky angles his head like he’s trying to look up at the guy, even though all he can see is the underside of Joe’s jawline and part of his cheek.

“Define ‘worse’.” 

He keeps his expression lofty-innocent, fighting hard against the smirk that wants to come out and play around the edges of his mouth. Eyes deliberately blinking up at Joe as he pulls back far enough to see Nicky’s face, gaze then sliding back down over the length of his body with a steely weight to it. Joe’s hand had started out beneath the lapel of Nicky’s jacket where it is made of heavy canvas, but now his fingers slide downwards until he can tap them against the flat of his sternum. Then they spread, slip lower, slotting themselves between the ribcage lines under Nicky's shirts.

And then the best part. Possibly the best thing Nicky has heard in his entire life: Joe laughs for real, a rolling noise that Nicky feels deep in his spine as Joe’s hand slides lower against Nicky’s torso, trailing down over his stomach until the tips of Joe’s fingers skirt around his navel. He laughs, and Nicky can practically hear the corners of his eyes crinkle and finds his own mouth split wide in a grin again. 

Joe keeps chuckling, a gentle rumbling, and now both of his hands slide over Nicky’s torso. He can feel a faraway pulse of Joe’s dick against the swell of his ass and it makes his head spin out, dizzy. 

“Are you trying to torment me here, or is it just talent?” Joe mumbles, and it comes out thick, a little muddled, with his teeth catching the upper edge of Nicky’s ear as he suddenly dips his head and noses against Nicky’s sideburn. Nicky blinks, dumbfounded, while his breath catches in his lungs and he feels like everything is spilling over with the way his cock throbs behind his zipper, and...

 _And_. Nicky hums, and licks over his lips to taste the scrape of dry skin and salt-sweat, and a smile he didn’t intend works his mouth over, and his skin sort of feels like it’s been stripped over with gasoline and a match every place that Joe touches him. He’s hyper focused on the way that the guy’s hands slide over his chest, and especially the way that one has slipped under the hem of his hoodie and is dragging blunt nails over the skin below his navel. 

“That’s a good line. You use it on all the guys who fall asleep in your lap?” He cuts back, trying to sound a little more brave than he feels, even as he tastes the bitter tang of anxiety at the back of his throat. Even though he’s smiling like there’s nothing else he wants in the world, other than more of the way that Joe’s dick is jammed up against the swell of his ass - because there isn’t.

“Maybe,” Joe admits, his voice turned silken and rough at the same time in Nicky’s ear. His dick still feels like steel against the base of Nicky’s spine when his hips shift over to the left, and Nicky is beyond aware of Joe’s fingertips dipping under the waistband of his jeans and the way his callouses catch against the cotton weave of his underwear. Nicky’s breath seizes in his throat and he feels like he’s been thinned out and dragged up to dizzying heights. Joe’s fingertips slide lower still, until they’re dragging heavy over his stomach just above the waistband of his underwear, driving a solid spike of want deep into Nicky’s belly.

“Someone could come down here,” Nicky warns, unable to keep from arching up a little into Joe’s touch as the guy’s fingers slip out from under his jeans and then lower again, down to his zipper. Lingering around the top button of his fly, then dipping down. Nicky’s cock is straining hard now, and normally he’d be embarrassed, except that he’s focused really hard on not coming in his pants when Joe’s fingertips trail down the visible line of his erection, and linger on the head of his cock where it’s pressed up against denim. 

“Before seven A.M.? Doubt it,” Joe says softly, nipping at his earlobe and Nicky groans, breath hitching in his throat. He’s pulled both his legs up on the love seat and his head leans back, with his occipital bone digging hard against Joe’s clavicle. He’s a little breathless now, mouth slack and malleable, while he arches his back just enough to lift his weight up and drop it back down deliberately in Joe’s lap. He’s _sort of_ trying to be an asshole now, but Joe’s hands don’t stop moving over Nicky’s skin. He’s trailing up and down the length of Nicky’s torso under his hoodie and t-shirt, and the fog pressing in around them only threatens to suffocate the rest of the world, and provides that extra edge against which Nicky’s heels can press so that the strangled groan in his throat might not be quite so humiliating as it breaks and Nicky turns his face up into Joe’s throat.

“I would really like,” Joe bites out, his voice rough-hewn where his lips buzz against Nicky’s scalp. "To not come in my pants right now. You’re not making that easy.”

And, okay, let’s be real - that in itself is almost enough to make Nicky come in _his_ pants. 

“That seems like a ‘you’ problem,” Nicky somehow manages to gasp out, even as his hips judder up against the press of Joe’s palm when his hand slips back down to curl against the front of Nicky’s jeans. The smell of charcoal-filtered cigarettes and honeyed whiskey fills his nose and he wants to cry out when the guy’s other hand starts working at the button and zipper of Nicky’s fly, then slides beneath his waistband and his boxer-briefs once he’s tugged them open. “ _Fuck_ , Joe -”

It’s a harsh, bitten-out sound and Nicky’s spine rolls with his arousal as he presses up against the heel of Joe’s hand. Joe is humming, voice husky velvet against Nicky’s scalp just behind his ear, and then the hand he’s slipped right under the material of his underwear skims over the underside of Nicky’s dick, warm palm skidding to a stop and fingers curling around the base with a circled thumb to meet them. Nicky gasps, the sound in sedated air like nails catching on silk because the guy is stroking the length of Nicky’s cock deliberately slow with warm, dry fingers, and Nicky reaches back to snag his hand in the lapel of Joe’s jacket with his thumb pressing hard into the shearling lining. He twists the wool and the denim in his grip, with his eyelids fluttering.

This is about the time when Nicky realizes that Joe must be at least a little bit of a sadist, since he’s chuckling as he strokes Nicky’s dick with his full fist, apparently pleased at the way that he has Nicky groaning under his breath while there’s a hot, sudden pulse of pre-come dripping down over Joe’s grasp.

“Jesus,” Nicky exhales, shaky, goosebumps popping up over the skin of his shoulders and chest, even under his layers, as he tries to keep his hips from jerking up into Joe’s hand. And Joe, he’s nosing against the side of Nicky’s neck while his hand squeezes and strokes slowly, evenly, sliding Nicky's foreskin back and forth and briefly thumbing over the head of his dick that Nicky can only imagine is flushed a vicious red. Joe’s fingers tighten as he strokes harder, faster, thumb squeezing, and he lets out a strangled groan with the blunt edge of his teeth butting against the edge of Nicky’s hairline on the back of his neck. Still, he grinds up against Nicky’s ass from below.

Nicky feels, rather than hears, the wet shape of his own mouth forming filthy curses. Feels himself arching into the hard grip of Joe’s touch. “I’m -” he tries to get it out but the sentence gets bitten in half, as his teeth click together hard and his tongue feels too big for his mouth.

And all of a sudden, there’s an angry clamouring through the early morning stillness, as an alarm goes off on Nicky’s phone where it’s tucked into his front pocket, and he twitches so violently that he almost elbows Joe in the solar plexus.

“ ** _Fuck_** ,” and this exclamation is so much louder, as Nicky trembles from his scalp down to his toes, and jams a hand into his pocket so that he can yank out his phone and glare at the screen. It’s a little blurred, and he realizes his eyes are wet, and his skull seems to ring like a struck bell when he realizes that this guy he barely knows has worked him over nearly to tears. 

And there, in all caps, is the alarm he’s named “ **GET THE FUCK HOME** ”, set to blare at full volume at 6:55 AM, and he’s fumbling with his lock screen as the siren echoes off the concrete surroundings under the bridge like a banshee. It feels like years before Nicky manages to thumb over the screen and dismiss the alarm. And then for another long, hollowed expanse of a second, he sits there and hates the entire world.

And then Nicky groans, sliding his hips down in Joe’s lap so that he can drag himself away from the glide of the guy’s hand against his cock, and it’s literally fucking torture. Like, he might actually die. He even sobs a litte, reaching up to grab Joe’s wrist as he tries to follow Nicky’s retreat and continue to be the sweetest hand that Nicky has ever felt on his cock - but no, he is unwillingly doing everything he never wanted by yanking Joe’s hand off of him. “ _Fuck_ , I hate everything.”

His voice sounds embarrassingly whiny to his own ears as he turns further into Joe’s chest and groans in frustration.

“I didn’t know it was this late,” he mumbles, hands fisting in the soft material of Joe’s shirt for a second before he reaches down and shoves his dick back in his underwear, then carefully yanks up his fly. Joe makes a noise that he takes for a question and Nicky sighs out a sound like rusty iron, hauling his weight up on the couch so that he’s sitting upright with his face landing hard against his hands. “That’s my emergency alarm. I gotta go home so that my parents don’t know I stayed out all night. _Fuck_.” 

He wants to kick out at something, but he doesn’t want to wreck Joe’s board or the bottle of Honey Jack where it’s wedged against the couch, and anything else is just going to break his toes. So instead he stands, and then he turns on his heel and looks Joe square in the face, and he sees the way that Joe’s expression looks flayed open to the layers of uncertainty and aborted arousal as his top teeth worry at his bottom lip. And Nicky wants nothing more than to kiss away that concern, to soothe his tongue over the places where he can’t help but imagine that Joe’s skin is unbearably soft.

“Come over,” Nicky says impulsively. “Once my parents leave for work. They’re usually gone by eight-thirty. I’ll make you breakfast, and we can - I don’t know, play Overwatch. If we want. Or… nap. Whatever the fuck.” 

He feels like he’s babbling now, because he’s got this dripping cavern in his chest that wonders if Joe will say no, and then the stone under the soles of his shoes will open to chatter his bones up before he dies of actual fucking embarrasment. He busies himself with zipping his hoodie, and adjusting it in an attempt to hide the fact that his dick is still laying hard and heavy in his underwear.

“Okay,” Joe says, and Nicky’s mouth twists for a second, before he grins and rakes his hair back from his forehead with a hand that he pretends isn’t shocky with adrenaline squirting in his veins. 

“Seriously?” He asks, then reaches into his pocket to pull his phone back out and unlock it with a swipe of his thumb against glass, streaking it oily with the sweat on his skin. Hands it over to the guy. “Put your number in. I’ll text you my address and let you know once they’re gone.”

Joe takes the phone, levelling one more wry glance in Nicky’s direction that he doesn’t really understand, while being scraped too thin between the scalloped edge of arousal and a desire to climb back into warmth and surrender. Like butter melting on dry toast.

Joe types his number into Nicky’s contact list before saving it as a lowercase ‘j,’ then hands it back and then reaches down to adjust himself in his jeans. Nicky doesn’t even pretend that he’s not watching, and unconsciously licks over his chapped lips. And then abruptly shoves the phone in the back pocket of his jeans and turns to head up the side of the slope that leads down from the overpass - and then he turns back again, cheeks flushed.

Joe is still staring at him. 

Nicky grins, a little breathless, and lifts his hand like he’s going to wave, like a fucking loser. But then Joe shifts and says - “Wait. Take my board, it’ll get you home faster. Since I’m gonna meet you there.” He reaches down and plucks his skateboard off the ground, holds it out into the empty stretch of air between them. Nicky stares at it for a long moment, and his hand is already reaching out to take it before he hesitates, pulls it back and lifts his gaze up to level with Joe’s.

“Only if you let me kiss you.”

And okay, he has no idea where the fuck that comes from, but it’s out there between them now and there’s no taking it back, so Nicky’s eye contact with Joe is unwavering. He watches the guy’s face flicker through a series of expressions that he still can’t quite interpret, even while having an inkling that they’re all good.

Joe’s mouth purses a little before flattening, and then the guy tilts his head, and he smiles.

“Okay.”

Nicky frowns a little, because he was expecting anything but that sort of reply, even while his feet carry him a little closer and Joe’s smile turns easy and sweet as he stands up from the love seat and keeps holding out the skateboard like a peace offering. He waits, until Nicky reaches out and closes his fingers around the taped-up end. And then instead of letting go, Joe’s hand that isn’t wrapped around his skateboard comes up and slides against the nape of Nicky’s neck, with thick fingers digging into the place where his hairline meets the back of his skull, and Nicky lets out a soft whimper while his lips crash against Joe’s.

The kiss goes on, until Nicky feels like he’s fighting against a greedy hand braced against his brow that wants to hold him underwater. The kiss, it’s warm breath and impatient lips, with the harsh scrape of teeth, and fingers pressing bruises into the back of Nicky’s neck. Joe’s mouth tastes like copper, and Nicky sort of wants to sob as the guy’s tongue delves into his mouth, soft and hot. He breaks away from the kiss feeling like it might kill him to do it.

With the sensation of Joe’s fingers tangling in his hair at the back of his skull, Nicky groans, licking over the swell of the guy’s upper lip before he pulls back and blinks, wide-eyed, at Joe’s blissful expression. Then he takes a step back with the skateboard clutched against his chest. 

“Thanks,” he mumbles, lips feeling bruised and flushed a deep red, before he turns towards the slope that leads up to the overpass from the underside of the bridge. And he takes one second to look back over his shoulder, at the guy who’s sunk back into the couch, sprawling with spread knees and an easy smile, and he feels a pulse of arousal right at the base of his cock where he’d haphazardly stuffed himself back in his jeans. “I’ll - see you soon, yeah?”

And Joe, he just smiles, with onyx eyes glinting a deep shine as he tugs his phone out of his pocket and makes a gesture like a salute.

Nicky has a moment to think that he’s deeply, incredibly fucked, as he climbs up the slope with Joe’s skateboard tucked under his arm and turns towards home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Your kudos and comments sustain me <333!


	3. Leather & Fog

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At the party in question, Joe had been floating deep in the twisting rivulets of an indica that felt like it’d washed away his sins for an hour or two, sinking into a ratty recliner in Copley’s living room that had probably been pulled out of some frat house’s fire sale. There he’d been, snickering at something that Booker had said, and deliberately cranking the handle that caused the footrest to swing out from the underside. Back and forth, like a metronome, crescendo driven by the comforting sense of repetition that came when one had ascended to an upper tier of fuzzy and just full-stop ran out of fucks to give, yeah?

Joe stretches out on the loveseat, all limbs and luxurious release of hyaluronan that spreads out between his joints and his tendons, allowing himself to relax and to sink deep into the cushions that are decorated by paisley and spotted with dew. The small of his back is sweat-damp, but he’s got the warmth of another person’s weight against his front and that makes it alright, he supposes.

He doesn't pinch himself, doesn’t need to, because that’s too much of a fucking cliché and he knows he doesn’t need to sink to that level. Joe knows himself. So, instead, he’s just watching the soles of Nicky’s shoes disappear up the hill after the exchange, and after the burning press of Nicky’s mouth against the seam of Joe’s lips, the waffled-rubber underside of those shoes slipping through the mud as the other guy stumbles up the side of the hill, it doesn't matter much. The last thing he can make out through the mist is Nicky climbing the path towards the topside of the overpass, out into the real world that supposedly still exists beyond the cloak of damp fog. 

Joe can’t really help but find it sort of hard to believe; that _anything_ is still out there.

Because how can the world not just be - _this_? The night spent with Nicky’s soft sleep-murmurs against the fleshy part of Joe’s bicep, and the way that he'd rolled into the tuck of Joe’s arm where it was wrapped around Nicky’s ribcage as Joe’s fingertips found their way under the waistband of Nicky’s jeans. And then the way he'd twisted further into the heat of Joe’s embrace and how Nicky’s face had relaxed, like it was the first time he’d slept well in ages, with the arches of his brows softening and his bottom lip puckering into something inarguably soft and kissable.

Maybe it was. 

Joe’s not sure. 

He _is_ sure of the rumble through the iron beams holding up the weight of a morning commute on the bridge overhead, a new day that’s just coming to life. They were halfway to the suburbs, this close to the edge of town proper, so Joe had meant it when he’d doubted the likelihood of anyone intruding on them. No one to see the incriminating tableau of Nicky’s spine boughed up against Joe’s chest, the way his muscles shifted under the clutch of Joe’s fingers where they’d twisted in his hoodie. The way that when the train had pierced through the silence and the fog, his grip twisted tighter in the bleach-spotted material of Nicky’s hoodie and he focused on the places where their bodies were in close contact.

Joe is certain that nothing he’s ever encountered could have broken through that impetuous, head-swimming arousal that has bound him together with this perfect fucking stranger at such an early hour. Although - he _isn’t_ a complete stranger, is he?

Because there’s been a few parties, the blur of ripped jeans and shaggy hair licking at the nape of Nicky’s neck, and half a dozen of the same band hoodies and asymmetrical haircuts that make up the crowd at the skatepark on any given day, but - that wasn’t just it, was it? There’s the same shade of boxed hair dye. The same, stretched earlobe piercings. There was the most recent party, the one where Joe had spotted this objectively beautiful guy with long hair that brushed against his shoulders in soft curls, all while he’d teetered wide-mouthed around the house where Copley lived with some unknown and ever-tilting cast of roommates (and Booker). 

Because see, this guy, with his long hair and his voice loud, and a little nasal, and faintly accented, while he slithered through the throng of the partygoers and seemed to blend between one group and another whilst Joe had lingered around the outskirts of the guys that he knew from the skate park - this guy was _something_. It was the sort of feeling, almost like a rejection, that resonated deep under Joe’s sternum until he almost felt like his heart was about to vibrate out from his chest. Somehow it managed to piss him off and make him happy at the same time.

And Joe thinks that maybe he'd seen a hint of recognition when those eyes had turned to him - those eyes that were somewhere between pale grey and some ridiculous shade of blue that almost won the battle to be a mint-pale green - and Joe remembers that it had _bothered_ him, the fact that he couldn’t quite define the exact shade of the guys’ eyes as they had faced off with the handle of Joe’s knife pressing hard against the heel of his hand. 

He knew the guy’s eyes were like chips of ice, pale and translucent, and Joe had zeroed in on that colour - the way that it made his fingertips twitch with the desire to find a suitable mixture of paint shades even as he’d stormed up to the place where Nicky had been sprawled out on Joe’s couch like he’d fucking owned it. Weeks had passed since the party, and Joe still held the anger that was mostly indignation, until he'd seen the way that Nicky’s smile had tilted up at him with bloodshot eyes and easy affection.

Because at that party, it wasn’t just the eyes. It was that profile, the goddamned line of an aquiline nose that Joe had studied in ancient busts during art classes and hadn’t really given a shit about at first, hadn’t understood the _significance_ of, until he was hunched with a jiggling leg in the back row while filling his sketchbook with outlined plans for a bunch of his next murals in etches of charcoal.

Joe tells himself that it’s the fucking line of the guy’s jaw, how it runs so _perfectly perpendicular to his cheekbones_ that it had snagged his attention at the party.

It’d been some typical shit-show at Copley’s, something where his guys and Merrick’s had managed to mingle without casualties, somehow. Probably just for the sake of flinging themselves down into oblivion - the only common thing that drew men under, just far enough to forget territorial rivalry. Or some shit like that. Joe tells himself that he never gives a fuck about the posturing, honestly - not about the two gangs playing at peace, just for the sake of getting fucked up. Even if they’re at the same party. 

Not about the baggies and glass vials being slipped between surreptitious handshakes that looked more like kids who’d watched Goodfellas too many times, barely-adults who held hands and thought they were hot shit, or relevant, or even fucking _important_ beyond the inevitability that a bunch of them would end up in unmarked, unmourned graves.

At the party in question, Joe had been floating deep in the twisting rivulets of an indica that felt like it’d washed away his sins for an hour or two, sinking into a ratty recliner in Copley’s living room that had probably been pulled out of some frat house’s fire sale. There he’d been, snickering at something that Booker had said, and deliberately cranking the handle that caused the footrest to swing out from the underside. Back and forth, like a metronome, crescendo driven by the comforting sense of repetition that came when one had ascended to an upper tier of fuzzy and just full-stop ran out of fucks to give, yeah?

And, see, it’d been the same sort of hazy: that melding of warm liquor in his veins and a few expertly-rolled joints that Booker had slipped into Joe’s breast pocket of his coat, some strand with a stupid name like Pink Zombie or God Bud, something indica-heavy and desperately determined to meld Joe’s hips and his femurs into the bow of the cushions underneath him. Booker had probably sworn up and down that it was primo shit straight over the Canadian border from British Columbia, but for all Joe knew or cared it could have come from the ditch that ran along the back of the trailer park that nudged up against the opposite side of the train tracks cutting through town. 

Joe can never keep them straight, all the different nuances of the pot strains - it doesn't matter, as long as they're tucked into pretty little cones and accordion cardboard filters, rolled by someone who knows what they're doing. He doesn't care, just as long as it's not going to crank the pace of his anxious heartbeat like a knife bevelled and thrust up between the bones of his ribcage. As long as the feeling is a warm curl that starts in the pit of his belly, as if the bottom of his stomach is held against an iron - and as Joe’s attention flickers back to the present while he stretches out on the love seat, he decides that he liked _whatever_ had turned Nicky into a pliant swirl of soft-serve in Joe’s lap for most of last night.

And yeah, Joe remembers the itch he’d felt back at the party, because it had been branded against the inside of his skull ever since. It’d started deep in his fingers and spiked outward like impending frostbite (he’d been reminded of that tingle that started under the skin whenever he forgot his gloves in an unexpected blizzard). When he’d felt the urge to draw a stranger’s profile, just because he’d spotted the guy from two rooms away. 

It was that _damned_ nose, is what he’d told himself later. That and the way that the guy’s hair flipped out into a soft curl at the uneven ends, that effortless sort of layering that meant he didn’t pay to get it done by some professional - that it was just that way because long was low maintenance. Joe groans and reaches up to scrub his hands over his face, before digging into the breast pocket of his denim jacket and slipping another smoke out of his pack. He lifts it to his lips, and struggles between wanting to figure out why he's thinking about Nicky’s motivation for his haircut, while at the same time realizing he’d had his hand wrapped around the soft, warm skin of Nicky’s dick just moments before.

Cause, see, that _wasn’t_ historically Joe. 

Yeah, he’s hooked up with guys. There’s been fumbling in dark rooms and uncoordinated kisses, but Joe's never actually gotten _off_ with another guy to the point of fucking completion or whatever the fuck, and he knows with a violent certainty that burrows down to the pale and fluffed marrow of his bones that he would have kept jerking Nicky’s cock in his lap if it hadn’t been for that fucking alarm. 

Because Joe remembers that night at the party, and how Nicky had tilted up onto the toes of his shoes as he wandered around the party with his laughter and the pale-blue shine of his gaze. Nicky's jawline had been practically fucking criminal, Joe remembers thinking, as the guy had turned and laughed at a redheaded girl crammed up against his side, and the joke she'd made in some obvious attempt to curry favour and attention had fallen short and Nicky was ready to lean between the spread of Joe’s knees without even being asked.

Joe had thought, later, that the kid with the too-long shag might have been his first angel.

Just _there_ , tossing back a tumble of long hair the same colour as wet sand, so that it skimmed the nape of his neck - and Joe had felt a kernel of devastation uncurling in his belly at the realization that he’d left his sketchpad in his bag upstairs, stashed under Booker’s bed, too far away for him to be able to capture the lines of his supposed angel.

What had made him smile so that the points of his canines flashed, and laugh hard and endless until two spots of ruddy colour rose high on his cheeks? Joe didn’t know, except that he might have loved Nicky from the first moment that he had seen the man’s face. But ever since that night, he's had the knowledge that he’d glimpsed some intangible sort of beauty, and it's made things alright for Joe. 

Alright for a while, at least. More than life has been for years. Except that on _this_ random Thursday night, for no discernable reason other than a writhing urge in his gut, Joe had bailed on another party because he just felt like going out to paint. He'd stumbled down the slope to his favourite bridge instead of trodding obediently along without rhyme and begging for reason. 

The path had turned slick with mud after the last rain, and as soon as he caught the familiar, arrow-fletching angle of that profile from thirty feet away, Joe’s heart leapt up into his throat. Tangling up in his own surprise, Joe had practically skidded out all the way to the edge of the concrete embankment, a miracle when he did not fall immediately to his knees on an express ride to certain disaster.

 _Him_. Sprawled halfway over _Joe’s_ fucking couch, like he fucking owned it. Well. Alright, the couch that Joe had found tossed out on the curb a couple of weeks ago. It’d just been too good an opportunity to pass up when he’d already been on his way to the bridge, right? Simply a matter of skimming off the address in a text to Booker, asking him to meet Joe there, instead of going straight to the bridge from his bus stop. 

And it was a cheap thing, practically synthetic kindling, so it’d been easy enough for the two of them to each pick up an end and carry it over the embankment, down the side of the road for a couple of blocks, until they’d reached the overpass and clambered over the guardrail with the love seat slung between their grasps. And then taking turns, lifting it over the guardrail as they slip-skidded, and the ground under their shoes became a softened slope, and they could set down the couch to slide it the rest of the way. 

Same shit, though. All that _made_ it Joe's couch.

And then there he was - this _kid_ posted up on the bridge with his knees spread wide, head tipped back, making Joe’s heartbeat judder up a couple of inches until it felt jammed sort of awkwardly against the junction that stretched between the edges of his ribcage. 

It’d been easier to pretend he was angry in those first few seconds, but there’d also been something warm and weightless, oscillating, sort of wildly, until the tension had bled out of Joe’s shoulders and he hadn’t been able to hold back his brain’s instinct as it worked to double take. His mouth had opened to snipe a scathing remark at close range and instead his molars fit back together, easy, even as he had to fight the urge to smile at the bleary-sweet expression etched out on Nicky’s features.

And then, the rest of it had sort of slid into place. Like _labneh_ over oatmeal in Joe’s mother’s kitchen, drizzled with warm honey. Sliding down his throat to fill up him, make him safe from the inside with sugar clinging to the backs of his teeth, with the bristle of lemongrass tea in his nose.

And alright, there was no way that Joe would have been able to keep up some pantomime of displeasure at Nicky’s presence under the bridge. Especially when it was his favourite place to escape in those hours of fading light. Had been, for fucking years. So, Joe hadn’t fought it when warm fingers of sleep dragged over his eyelids for several long and silent minutes; after he’d somehow coaxed a dizzy-spinning Nicky to recline back against his chest. 

And why should he? (Fight, that is.) He’d had the solid warmth and weight spread over his front like a blanket, and the view from an entirely new angle, staring down topside at the bridge of the guy’s nose and a softly flared upper lip beyond that. _Gifts_ had been pressed into Joe’s lap and he wasn’t about to question them when he thought that Nicky was the most beautiful man he’d ever seen in his life.

Probably, Joe should have thought to reach for the scraps of charcoal and his sketchpad where they lay tucked away in his backpack, leaning against the side of the love seat. It had been his chance to try to scratch Nicky down into soft lines and smudged edges on paper. 

But it was nearly all that Joe had been able to manage, to keep just one hand rumpled in the front of Nicky’s hoodie above his breastbone before the guy canted off into a slipshod sleep, and Joe felt his own eyelashes growing heavy in sodden sympathy after Nicky disappeared off the slide of the slope into slumber. That was how the night ended and Joe’s fingers had twisted in the soft cotton that had stretched over Nicky’s breastbone. 

And that had ended how it ended, when Nicky had to head home at the crack of forever fucking o’clock, yeah, and Joe had time to kill. Apparently.

~

A few minutes after Nicky heads up the slope, Joe hears the sound of wide, rubbery wheels clattering against the pavement. Joe can see, in his head, the top-heavy silhouette of Nicky’s torso disappearing through the fog, the way that he’d shift his weight in order to adjust his riding style to Joe’s wider cruiser. And then something flares in Joe’s chest, so that he hauls his weight off the love seat with little ceremony and teeters on the soles of his feet, and then he feels that swoop of gravity’s scales avulsing him onto his knees and towards the edge of the embankment.

Distantly, Joe feels the deep shudder way down in his kneecaps. 

It tells him that another train is rumbling down the line, and so he reaches to dig through his bag until he can find his headphones and unzip them from the hard shell of their casing. They’re huge: over-ear and noise cancelling, so that the high hats and chords become his entire world and protect his hearing from so many hours spent under the bridge, in what is essentially a funnel of ear splitting sound with the screech of air brakes vibrating right through the seams in Joe’s skull. Their plastic band stretches over the crown of Joe’s head and smashes down his curls from ear to ear, and then he yanks up the hood of his jacket in the vain hopes of avoiding too much of his paint drifting down into his hair.

The train is already lumbering by when Joe slings his backpack over his shoulder and starts to trudge carefully down the embankment, feeling kinda naked without his board. There’s a stretch of concrete support columns between the bottom of the slope and the train tracks, most of them already muddied with years of overlapping tags. But Joe has spent the last two nights down here with a bucket of black satin primer and a Home Depot paint roller so that he could blank-out a stretch of concrete eleven feet wide and six feet tall. It’s the least desirable real estate, in his defense, on the side of the pillars facing the tracks, and he’s been watching closely for four months to make sure that no new tags went up. Nobody wants to tag here, and the danger is a little to blame, but mostly it’s the fact that nobody is going to fucking see it. 

Notoriety is as potent of a drug as blood-surging opiates.

The tracks here don’t even carry passenger trains. It’s all box cars and heavy cargo, so anybody who wants to paint on the far side of the pillars that hold up the overpass is pretty much doing it because either they care about whatever the fuck it is they want to paint, or because they’re too chicken-shit to tag over somebody else’s drippy, bloated-bubble font. 

But Joe has been planning this out. For weeks. He’s got seven pages in his sketchpad devoted to this shit, and he’s pleased when he reaches out and gently taps his fingertips against the black primer to confirm that it’s dried to a point of just-tacky-enough where he knows the spray paint will stick without dripping too much, as long as he doesn’t bring the nozzles too close. He slings his backpack on the ground and starts unloading and uncapping cans, lining them up according to shade in front of his feet where he’s got a shoulder-wide stance, feeling the roots growing out of his heels and into the soil and rock underneath him.

Joe can see the mural that he’s been planning in his head, almost as if it’s laid out on actual paper in front of him. A violent orange for the tiger lillies that stretch up one of the columns. A cluster of gerbera daisies in every flamboyant hue, creeping along the bottom edge in parallel to the train tracks. And slices of a bouquet made up of camellias in pink, sprigs of myrtle, and white clover, all exploding upwards like a fourth of July display as high as Joe can reach. 

After an hour, his hands and his sleeves are striped in shades of stained glass, and the mural’s plans have changed - Joe is just the vehicle, but the paint on the wall is in the driver’s seat. The piece has stretched out until the columns of flowers have arranged themselves like a barcode, with negative space carving shapes out of the colour and a mind all its own. Some of the flowers are just outlines, because he realized that he needs to mix new colours before he could stretch them out. But the entire piece is sketched out in rough white, so that he can get an idea of proportion, and try to understand what’s waking up both from within the concrete and also the cavity of Joe’s chest.

He wipes his hands, back and front, across his jeans when he feels his phone _bzz-bzz_ in his back pocket, not really cleaning away the paint so much as smearing it around and deep into the whorls of his identity. Realistically, it doesn’t really matter that his phone’s already-smudged case just gets a little prettier. What matters is the text from a number he doesn’t recognize: just an address, one that Joe guesses must be about a twenty minute walk away.

*

_I spent some time in a bad place at eighteen_

Joe’s finger depresses the nozzle of the paint can and he feels his limbs carving out a sharp angle between the tall-stretch outlines that he has sketched in his notebook. There are bright colours: cerulean, and citron, and subtle shades of seafoam stretching up between lines of negative space between orchids and poppies and the violent orange of tiger lillies, and he fishes a little-used can of daffodil yellow that claims some space between the outlines and the edges of his mural.

Joe adjusts the weight of his headphones over his ears for a moment, leaving fingerprints of spray paint on the plastic casing, and he wishes that he could back up safely and see the shapes of his paintings from a distance instead of overthinking and up close. His fingers are splattered with the blow-back of paint before he finally yanks his headphones away from his ears until they’re slung around his neck.

 _Do you ever wake up to feel like your life is meaningless?_

The pained vocals cruise in his ears and he tries not to think about the lines that proclaim _I spent a time in a bad place at eighteen_ ; if he thinks about the colour of dried blood under his fingernails and caked into the lines of his knuckles, there’s a chance he might have to turn around and walk away from the work that he’s been cutting with colour into cement. There’s something special, knowing that his artwork might help to hold up thousands of pounds and the rippling weight of rubber tires, almost like the gravity that some poor, misguided Atlas carries upon his shoulders. 

Instead, the lyrics make Joe think about the look on his father’s face as they stood across from one another after a mortician had wrapped up both his mother and his sister; his father’s wife and daughter, wrapping them into their shrouds so that neither Joe nor his father had been able to wash them in ritual as they would have been able to do if their bodies were male.

Joe thinks, later - years, many fucking years, mind you - that he would have liked to participate in the bathing of their bodies if it were something allowed to them. This was his _mother_ , and his baby sister, and he knew that he had played no small part in the way that they had been gunned down like animals. He had been there, begging with that man who clutched the semi-automatic pistol in his hand as if it were a lifeline, demanding that Joe’s mother opened the register where it sat behind the counter, and then suddenly clenched a finger around the trigger when Joe had rushed out from the back store room.

It had been too late.

Joe thinks, later - years later, every single night - about the way that his mother and sister’s faces had looked when their lips had begun to turn blue and Joe sat on the staircase, waiting as the paramedics and then the police officers and then the medical examiner had made their way through the shop. He remembered that Booker had shown up with coffee and donuts that Joe hadn’t been able to look at without feeling nauseous. 

It’d been a surreal exchange of events, and Joe had wheeled violently between numbness and a wild sort of hysteria, and then Booker had called Copley, who'd shown up and immediately taken care of the details, finding a funeral home even at 3am (which, Joe realized after the fact, was probably prime time in their area of town, and that’s why both of the men had shown up in velvet peacoats to the shopfront before they carted off his mother and his baby sister.)

Joe’s lost in the way that the paint carves out shapes out of nothingness, and he has a vague sense of awareness that the lines have gotten away from him, breathing life into shapes that he hadn’t planned but that demand to exist the same way that stubborn weeds burst up between the railroad ties behind him. 

His head is floating between the fumes and the ache left behind his eyes from the whiskey that lingers in his liver and makes his tongue feel fuzzy and his lips dry and tight with dehydration. So he doesn’t feel the vibration of his phone in his pocket right away. He’s actually chalking it up to another shuddered warning of an oncoming train heading into town, and by the time he realizes his mistake and tucks a can of red paint under his arm, freeing up his hand to slip his phone out of his pocket, there’s a notification for _five_ texts sent in rapid succession.

`1069 Creaton End  
you better not bail because i have SLAVED over this breakfast :)  
oh fuck i just realized i didnt ask if theres anything you dont eat  
my mother would be more disappointed in me for that than she would about me staying out all night  
ok maybe not  
  
`

` `` `

` `` `

Joe has to stop himself from covering his mouth with his fingers as he laughs, because he’s sure he’s already got paint on his face and doesn’t need to make it worse. He tugs off the black, nitrile gloves that he’s worn to keep the worst of the mess off his hands ever since the first time that he tried to paint after the funeral and nearly threw up when he found red paint caked under his cuticles when he got home. He tucks them in his back pocket and shoves the cap back on the can of red before dropping it into his bag, then pulls his phone back out and feels himself grinning again as he sees that another message has come in.  
  
`pls dont leave me hanging. vegan? gluten free? i need to know how much i should be panicking rn man `

So even as Joe huffs another soft laugh under his breath, he takes pity on the guy and shoots back a text before he starts packing up the rest of his paint cans.  
  
`No pork, that’s all. `

Because he doesn’t feel like trying to explain that he’s kept halal for most of his life, or why that changed a couple of years ago. So instead he slips his headphones off for a second, just so that he can tug off his respirator and suck in a lungful of early morning air that tastes sweet compared to the musty smell of rubber that clings to the insides of his nostrils. He’s almost surprised to find that the fog has mostly cleared over the last hour, burning off with the golden glaze of autumn sunlight that’s still not quite warm enough to take the bite of chill out of the breeze that’s coaxing leaves from the trees. 

His phone buzzes again and this time it’s just a thumbs-up emoji, so he supposes that Nicky considers the breakfast crisis averted. He takes the time to save the number as a contact in his phone, then types the address given into Google Maps and sees that it’s only a fifteen minute walk. It would have been less on his board, obviously, but he happens to know that if he follows the tracks in the direction of town, there’s a fence he can hop over and land on a hiking trail that cuts through a ravine up to a main road with a wooden staircase. Not exactly doable on a skateboard, but it’ll cut at least five minutes off the trek on foot. 

By the time he’s trotting up the paved row of flagstones towards the house that Nicky has sent him via text, the other guy is already standing behind the screen door. “You were expecting something different?” 

Nicky’s face is trying for smooth, but falling short. He looks expectant, and Joe has a flitting thought that he could eat soup out of this dimples.

Nicky just grins, canines flashing. 

"I'm going to find you gum."

**Author's Note:**

> As always, you can find me on [tumblr](https://moretome-thanyoucandream.tumblr.com) \- come say hi! I also post aesthetic boards for this AU and other Immortal Husbands stuff.


End file.
